Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Mess with Your Mind"

Text: Acts 16:16-34

with a definition …

Some of you will have heard this term before,

but for others, it may be new.

It’s an expression you might come across particularly

if you hang out with psychologists,

or perhaps with other social scientists as well.

The phrase is, "cognitive dissonance."

Cognitive, as in,

having to do with the mind and one’s thought processes;

like the sounds you get when the cat walks across the piano keys.

Cognitive dissonance refers to

that state of mind, that mental moment,

when we were expecting one thing to happen,

and instead something else happens.

A kind of mental tension, if you will.

A brief messing with your mind.

Let me start with a small-scale,

and kind of silly, example.

Let’s say I’m up here preaching some Sunday,

and I launch into a quotation,

"Now is the time for all good men

to come to the aid of their porcupine."

Gotcha!

There’s a brief jolt there,

because of course you expected me to say "country,"

and instead I said "porcupine."

Your experience of cognitive dissonance would pass quickly …

even if I weren’t doing it on purpose as an example,

if that were really to happen …

you would know that maybe I had lost my place,

or couldn’t read my own writing,

or my fingers got really tangled up on the keyboard,

or maybe I was deliberately trying to get your attention,

so my saying "porcupine"

would not cause you a great or prolonged mental tension.

Now, let’s try a less trivial example.

I imagine that at least some of you

experienced cognitive dissonance in this very place, a few years ago,

when your pastor nominating committee

came to you and said,

"We’ve found a pastor for our church;

let us tell you about her."

That was probably not the pronoun you expected to hear!

And so each of you had to decide

how you were going to deal with the difference between

what was originally expected, and what actually came about.

Okay, we’ve learned a new phrase.

So what?

Aside from perhaps having added to our repertoire

of ten-dollar words,

what if anything do we do with the concept of cognitive dissonance?

What does it have to do with our faith?

I hadn’t ever thought about the two in connection with one another

until one of our professors in the Doctor of Ministry program

had us read the book he had written,

in which this was one of the chapters.

But you know, it’s right there in the Bible,

even though of course they don’t call it that!

The scriptures are full of people experiencing cognitive dissonance.

We see it again and again, for example, in the Easter stories:

first, as disciples struggle with the meaning of

a death they hadn’t anticipated and could not understand …

and second, as they see Jesus appear to them

in ways that make no logical sense.

Today’s reading from the book of Acts

shows us Paul and Silas adventuring in Philippi,

when they undergo some experiences

that have to have caused some moments of serious mental tension!

They remain in the city several days,

teaching in various different settings,

and, we are told, they heal a slave girl

who had been possessed by a spirit of divination.

What reward do they get?

Her owners are furious …

Paul and Silas have healed their steady source of income,

and shut of her fortune-telling abilities.

So they have Paul and Silas accused,

and hauled into court, and beaten,

and thrown into prison.

And although the author doesn’t tell us much

about Paul’s and Silas’s inner thoughts and feelings during this time,

we can hazard a guess.

Because we also have been through times in our journey of faith

when we have really tried to do things right:

have done what God called us to do,

have tried to live up to God’s plan for our lives,

and nevertheless, things have come out wrong.

We have had times when it seemed like

we were being punished for our faithfulness

rather than being rewarded, or at least recognized.

These are times of very painful cognitive dissonance.

It’s not just our minds that are being messed with;

our hearts also hurt at such times …

but what makes the heartache so much worse

is that we really expected a certain kind of response from God,

and instead we got what seemed to be exactly the opposite.

But remember the way in which

Paul and Silas respond to this challenge to their faith:

Do they sit up all night arguing,

"I told you we should never have come to Philippi!"

"Well, we wouldn’t be in trouble if you didn’t keep

meddling in people’s lives!"

No, they don’t argue.

Do they go through pangs of self-doubt,

wondering if they misunderstood their call from God?

They do not.

Do they fight with God and say,

"Fine, we just won’t preach the gospel any more.

If this is how you treat your friends,

it’s no wonder you have so few of them!"?

They do not.

They sit in prison with their feet fastened in the stocks,

and spend the night praying

and singing hymns to God!

Exactly the opposite of what

common sense would tell us to expect.

And what’s really interesting

is that a number of sociologists who have studied this kind of thing

in some detail …

yes, there are people who study this stuff! …

have found that this Paul-and-Silas story is the norm.

That with groups, especially,

when they have a particular belief or an expectation

that, in the course of things, doesn’t happen,

or gets disconfirmed, or even disproved,

the group doesn’t give the belief up;

instead, if anything, it is strengthened.

Now, from our point of view,

we can see that sometimes that might be a good thing,

and sometimes it might be a very bad thing.

The social scientists don’t make a value judgment about it;

they simply point out to us that,

time and again in human experience,

this is how things happen.

We, though, have to evaluate;

we have to try to discover whether

healthy or hurtful things are happening

as a result of our beliefs.

Let me give you an example of one that might be considered unhealthy.

In the early 1800s,

a man named William Miller studied his Bible and did some calculations,

and reached the conclusion that the world would end in 1843.

It didn’t.

You would think that his followers,

who had sold or given away all their possessions in preparation for this moment,

might have been a little upset with him!

Might have wondered about his sanity,

or at least, asked to check his calculations?

No … several times,

over a period of more than a year,

they would determine a new, "corrected" date,

and prepare even more intensively for the end,

and invite others to join them.

When again it didn’t happen,

there was no time for doubting …

recalculate once again,

and prepare for the end to come next month instead.

Meanwhile, all along,

they were in fact attracting people and adding to their numbers.

It took four complete disconfirmations,

up through October of 1844,

before the Millerite movement finally collapsed.

Until that time,

each previous disconfirmation had only convinced the true believers

that now, surely the end was even nearer,

so they must keep believing and proselytizing.

A strange chapter in church history.

A healthier example

occurred much earlier in church history.

It’s clear from some of Paul’s earliest letters

that he, and many other of those early Christians,

expected that Christ would return at any moment.

Certainly, before any of them had died.

And when that didn’t happen,

it was disconcerting at first.

It could have destroyed the new, young church,

when believers grew older and then died,

and still Christ had not come back.

Instead, they were able to re-frame their understanding

and to maintain a belief in Jesus’ eventual return,

but with the caution that it was not for us to know

the specific time, or details.

As, indeed, Jesus had apparently said while he was still walking among us.

They understood that they were being given additional time,

so that Christ’s message could be shared as widely as possible.

And that, also, is quite interesting.

Because another discovery the sociologists have made about cognitive dissonance

is that when a group has experienced this kind of disconfirmation,

one response that nearly always happens

is that the group gains new energy to evangelize

and to try to convert others to their way of thinking.

Again, that seems puzzling at first.

But look back at Paul and Silas,

praying and singing in prison …

Not only do we have an earthquake that opens all the doors,

and causes the prisoners’ chains to fall off …

We have Paul and Silas staying put and not trying to run off,

which is a piece of cognitive dissonance for the listener ..

And then, we have the jailer and his entire family

converted in response to what he has just seen and heard.

What about us, though?

I am not suggesting that we should create some interesting new belief,

and then arrange to have it disproved,

so that we can strengthen our faith,

and become energized for evangelism!

That’s contrived and dishonest.

I do mean to suggest, though,

that we as individuals, and we as a group,

should perhaps be more aware of, and more comfortable with,

some of the dissonances that are already a part of our faith.

In terms of our faith history,

we believe that the God who created all that is

nevertheless died on a cross for us.

We believe that the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth

was resurrected out of death and restored to life.

And in terms of our own stories:

we have faith in God

even when our own lives hit rough patches;

we believe that God is in control,

even though it doesn’t always look that way;

we believe that God will ultimately prevail,

even though the power of evil is clearly at work around us,

and sometimes even within us.

We Presbyterians have difficulty sometimes

when our faith and our reason

seem to be in tension with one another.

Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable.

And our temptation has been to try to smooth it out

by making our faith seem more reason-able,

when it may in fact be that we need to do just the opposite.

The stories of the New Testament, and the work of modern-day social scientists,

seem to suggest that we need to celebrate and to be energized by

those aspects of our faith

which are in tension and dissonance with other parts of life.

That evangelism doesn’t happen

when we try to align ourselves with the world,

but rather when we tell why we’re different.

The truth of God does often sound strange,

especially to twenty-first century ears.

And yet, it is this truth which sets us free,

even while it messes with our minds.

Free from the restrictions the world would place on us …

Free to tell the world the good news that it needs,

but doesn’t know that it needs.

May this weird but wonderful calling bring us joy.

Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)